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ON THE IDIOMATIC NATURE OF THE GOTHIC NEW TESTAMENT: A COMPARATIVE STUDY OF PREPOSITIONAL USAGE IN GOTHIC AND NEW TESTAMENT GREEK 1
Author(s) -
KLEIN JARED S.
Publication year - 1992
Publication title -
transactions of the philological society
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.333
H-Index - 26
eISSN - 1467-968X
pISSN - 0079-1636
DOI - 10.1111/j.1467-968x.1992.tb00423.x
Subject(s) - extant taxon , literature , linguistics , new testament , philosophy , object (grammar) , ancient greek , modern greek , history , art , evolutionary biology , biology
In syntagms involving preposition + object the match‐up between Gothic and Greek seems at first sight highly capricious both lexically and with regard to case government. This paper presents the results of an exhaustive analysis of every prepositional phrase of both Greek and Gothic within a delimited but significant subcorpus of the Gothic Bible. Once one has made allowance for diachronic developments affecting the case systems of Greek and Gothic, the resulting structure represents an idiomatic and cohesive syntactic, semantic, and lexical system within Gothic. These findings support Curme's contention that our extant Gothic corpus is idiomatic and not a slavish and forced Gothicized version of Greek.